The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 11,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 18 years to get that many views.

Well the world didn’t end on 21 December, but our ADSL router did — it was zapped by lightning on the evening of the 20th, and so we missed the momentous event, just when I was making some interesting discoveries about the Stooke family too.

I seem to have lost touch with many of the people who were researching the Stooke family. Our biggest breakthrough came from Joyce Robinson in Victoria, Australia, who sent us a huge family tree back in 1989, and at the time we were in though with several descendants of the Stooke family, including David Furse (who has since died), who had links to two different Stooke families. Back in the early 1990s we were in touch with several others as well, but now there doesn’t seem to be anyone to share interesting family news with.

So if you’re interested in Stooke families originating in Devon in England, and are reading this, please leave a comment.

I have also started a Stooke family forum on YahooGroups. This is a place for contacting others interested in the Stooke family history. The main feature of a mailing list for posting research queries and discoveries etc, but there are also facilities for exchanging Gedcom and other files, posting photographs, databases and more. Please click on the link to find out how to join.

I originally tried to post this on the quick & dirty Posterous blog, but it doesn’t seem to work any more.

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code TGHPAGZA9JSS within a new blog post and publish it. This code must appear in the published post and it must also appear in your corresponding RSS feed once published.

One of the advantages of the growth of the Internet and the amount of genealogical information available is that one can find things quite quickly that might have been quite impossible when we first started doing genealogy in 1974.

The first thing I did when we started was to order my grandfather’s birth certificate, from which I discovered that his parents (and my great grandparents) were William Allen Hayes and Mary Barber Stooke of Bedminster, near Bristol in England. After about 15 years we had managed, mainly through correspondence, to link Mary Barber Stooke to a Stooke family tree at Ashton and Trusham in the Teign valley in Devon, going back to the 16th century. A relative from another branch of the family who lived in Devon went into the Devon record office and checked the records in the tree step-by-step, copying the records by hand and sending them to us by snail mail.

Ashton in Devon, with the bridge over the River Teign. John Stooke, my 8x great grandfather, son of Thomas Stooke and Elizabeth Honywill, was baptised in Ashton on 9 August 1592

But we still did not know about Mary Barber Stooke’s brother and sister.The earlier generations were fairly well documented, the more recent ones were not, or at least the documents were less accessible.

We knew she had a sister Sarah, because they were staying together in the 1871 census before Mary Barber Stooke got married. Both their parents seemed to have died by then. It was only much later that we discovered that they had a brother Thomas, and through resources like FreeBMD and FreeCEN managed to discover that he was living in Exmouth, Devon, in 1891, with a wife Mary Ann and two children — Lionel Leigh Stooke and Mildred M. Stooke.

And a mysterious e-mail correspondent, known to me only as visionir, told me that Sarah Stooke had married Charles Robert Parker who ran the Colston Arms pub in Bedminster, Bristol, and hinted that he/she had a lot of information on that family, but refused to share it, saying that he/she already had enough information on them and didn’t need any more. I was able to verify some of this information from censuses, but consulting them entailed a 70km drive to the LDS Family History Centre in Johannesburg, and ordering the the films from Salt Lake City if necessary, and waiting two months for the films to arrive.

I tried to follow up Lionel Leigh Stooke and Mildred M. Stooke. As more resources came online it became easier and quicker. Their parents, Thomas and Mary Ann Stooke, seem to have died between the 1901 and 1911 censuses. Mildred seems to have married a Leonard O. Meyer and to have had a son Lionel O. Meyer, born in 1918, but of her brother Lionel there was no sign. Had he died? Had he emigrated? There was no way of knowing.

But then the Internet provided the information that would have been impossible to find before — in the London Gazette of 31 May 1949 the following notice appeared:

NOTICE is hereby given that by a deed poll dated
the 19th day of May, 1949, and duly enrolled in the
Supreme Court of Judicature on the 26th day of
May, 1949, I, STEPHEN RENDEL of Number 76
Roman Road Colchester in the county of Essex
Retired a natural born British subject renounced and
abandoned the first names of Lionel Leigh and the
surname of Stooke.—Dated the 27th day of May,
1949.
STEPHEN RENDEL, formerly known as Lionel
(207) Leigh Stooke»

And from that clue it has been possible to piece together the story of Lionel Leigh Stooke, alias Stephen Rendel. From knowing next to nothing about him, suddenly we know more than we know even about his sister.

He grew up in Littleham (Exmouth), living with the family at 6 Raleigh Terrace. He was there at the time of the 1901 census at the age of 16.

He became a civil engineer and went to work in South America. He returned to the UK in August 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, under the name of Stephen Rendel, aged 30, and joined the army under that name, giving his birthplace as Hertfordshire. But no Stephen Rendel appears as being born in Hertfordshire (or Herefordshire for that matter) in FreeBMD, or in any census prior to 1911 that I have been able to consult. His appearance at the age of 30 seems to have been his first.

After the war he married Elsie Bowden, and they had a daughter Doris in the UK, and on their next journey back from South America, in 1928, they also had another daughter Pamela, aged 1. Doris appears to have married Anthony White in 1941, and Pamela to have married Peter Lewars in 1947.

So that seems to be what happened to Lionel Leigh Stooke, but it would be interesting to know why he changed his name, and why he only decided to register the change about 35-40 years later.

His sister Mildred is also quite interesting.

She seems to appear in the 1911 census as May Stooke aged 23. May was probably Mildred’s middle name, and the address and age are right — she was still living at 6 Raleigh Terrace, Exmouth, with a son Roy, aged 3, and a maid Elsie Hocking.

She also had fun with the census form, taking the mickey out of the bureaucrats. Under the “Marriage” column she wrote “Hope to be married shortly” — and she apparently was married a couple of months later. For the maid she wrote under marriage “Awaiting opportunity”, which the dour bureaucrats crossed out and replaced with “Single”.

1911 Census Entry for 6 Raleigh Terrace, Exmouth, Devon, England

Under Occupation she described herself as “Cook’s Mate”, and her young son Roy as “Guzzla”.

The last column was for Nationality under which she described all three as “Devonshire dumplings”.

The other branch of this family, of Sarah Stooke who married Charles Robert Parker, likewise seems to have got split up after the 1901 census, with the death of both parents.

There were three children, four, counting one who died young. They were:

Henry Charles Bannerman Parker (born about 1889)

Amelia Mary Parker and Edward Colston Parker (twins, born 1890, but Edward died the following year)

Edward James Stooke Parker (born 1891)

Edward James, the youngest, may have married Kate Jacobs.

This particular branch of the Stooke family — Mary Barber, Sarah and Thomas — were the children of Thomas Stooke (1815-1868) who was born in Chudleigh, Devon, and married Mary Harriet Hollins, daughter of Richard Hollins. Unlike the Stookes, we know very little of the antecedents of the Hollins family.

And if anyone out there is related to these Devonshire dumplings, please get in touch — we love discovering new cousins!

Update 27 Jan 2013

And now a descendant of the “Devonshire dumplings” has indeed got in touch, and we have been able to sort out their story a bit.

One of the things about the 1911 census entry that is a bit puzzling is that May Stooke describes herself as a “daughter”, and not as the head of the household, suggesting that she is the daughter of an absent father or mother, in which case Roy might have been her brother and not her son.

This has indeed proved to be the case. Mary Ann Stooke (born Johnson) died in 1902, and the widower Thomas Stooke married Jane Moore in about May 1905, and they had a son Leslie Roy Stooke in 1908, the “guzzla” of the 1911 census. Thomas and Jane Stooke were staying in a hotel in Blackpool, Lancashire at the time of the 1911 census, where both are described as having been born in “Barnstaple, Bristol” — the hotelier was probably a bit confused when he filled in the census form.

And while we haven’t yet managed to discover why Lionel Leigh Stooke changed his name to Stephen Rendel, it appears that his maternal grandfather’s name was John Rendle Johnson.

Ten years ago we met some Crighton relatives for the first time. Nita Harris (born Crighton), who lives in the USA, had lost touch with her brother Roger, but ten years ago the reestablished contact, and she came to South Africa with her son Roger Harris to see Roger, who was very ill. We arranged to meet between Johannesburg and Pretoria, at BJ’s Restaurant, built over the freeway.

Walter Crighton is Roger Crighton’s son (and Nita’s nephew). The common ancestors are William John Crighton (1842-1886) and Anna Maria MacLeod (1849-1917). William John Crighton was a saddler in Cape Town, and died when fighting a fire on Table Mountain, when his horse apparently stood on a burning ember and threw him.

William John Crighton was one of 10 children of Henry Crighton and Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme, and three of those children married members of the MacLeod family of Cape Town. Petronella Francina Dorothea Flamme was the granddaughter of a slave, Francina van de Kaap.

When we first became interested in family history we asked Val’s grandmother about the Greene side of the family (her in-laws) and she said they were a Crighton family who were leather merchants in Cape Town. So in 1975 we looked them up in the Cape Archives, and in the files were found some correspondence from a Miss Nita Crighton (as she then was), who was interested in the same family, and had written from the USA asking for copies of the same records. We wrote to her at the address on those old letters, asking that they be forwarded if she had moved, and discovered that she had married William Harris and was living in California. So we corresponded for several years about the family history, and visited Nita’s mother and her aunt who were living in an old age home in Bertrams, Johannesburg, in 1986, but it was only 10 years ago that we met face to face.

Yesterday I discovered a Hayes relation I had not known about before; he is Francis Joseph Hayes, born about 1882.

Discovering hitherto unknown relations is not unknown in genealogical and family history research — that’s what it’s all about. But the difficulty is finding where this one fits in.

Francis Joseph Hayes appears on the 1911 English census, aged 29, staying with the Nobbs familyat 11 Ashchurch Park Villas, Hammersmith, London. Most of the male members of the family are gun makers, and he is too. He is shown as the nephew of the head of the household, 62-year-old Barbara Nobbs, widow. From other sources I know that she was Barbara Rachel Hayes, born in Bristol, England, and baptised at St Andrew’s Church, Clifton, Bristol, on 15 July 1848.

name:

Francis Joseph Hayes

event:

Census

event date:

1911

gender:

Male

age:

29

birthplace:

Finsbury Park London N, London

record type:

Household

registration district:

Fulham

sub-district:

North Hammersmith

parish:

Hammersmith

county:

London

Barbara Rachel Hayes married William Nobbs, gun maker, on 4 June 1870, and they had five children, Rosa, William, Wesley, Elijah and Chrisopher. By 1911 three of the five were dead: Rosa, William and Christopher all died in their 30s, apparently unmarried and leaving no descendants. At the 1911 census two of the five children were at home: Wesley, with his wife Florence and two children, and Elijah Thomas Nobbs, who was still single. And then the mysterious Francis Joseph Hayes, nephew.

Where did Francis Joseph come from?

Barbara Rachel Hayes was the eldest of eight children of Sander Hayes and Barbara Deake Clevely. She did have a nephew William Joseph Hayes, born in 1882, son of her brother Christopher Albert Hayes, but William Joseph Hayes died 18 months later, and his birth and death are recorded on a plaque in the Easton-in-Gordano cemetery. None of her other brothers had children born in the right time frame, and their children were all born in Bristol.

One brother, John Hayes, was in the right place at the right time. He married Maud Alice Rogers in Bristol in 1877, and they had two daughters, Maude and Adelaide, in 1878 and 1879 respectively, and they appear on the 1881 census living in London, where John was a builder. It is possible that they could have had a son in London in 1882. But in 1885 the family emigrated to the USA, where they show up in censuses for San Francisco — father, mother and two daughters — no Francis Joseph. Is it likely that they would have emigrated and left a three-year-old child behind?

Earlier censuses don’t seem to cast much light on the matter, so perhaps he was in America, and returned.

Perhaps it’s time to bite the bullet and order the birth certificate for this one: